Boston bombing suspect less talkative

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Boston bombing suspect less talkative

By Greg Botelho and Ben Brumfield

CNN

(CNN) — The Boston bombing suspect has become less talkative since authorities read him his Miranda rights before charging him with using a weapon of mass destruction. They also moved him from a private to a prison hospital.

But the information Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, gave investigators in two sessions of questioning spanning three days has produced good leads, a U.S. law enforcement official said.

Investigators spent Friday combing a dump in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for his laptop and other clues that could shed light on the suspects behind the bloody attack, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said.

Tsarnaev led authorities to look there, the source said, and others who may have knowledge of the computer’s whereabouts or may have played a role in disposing it also provided leads that prompted the search.

Suspect in detainee hospital

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev moved Friday from Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he had been held since his capture a week ago, to a federal inmate medical center 40 miles away.

Beth Israel treated some of the more than 260 people injured in the Boston Marathon attack allegedly carried out by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Some 30 of them remained hospitalized Friday, including one in critical condition, according to a CNN tally.

The Federal Medical Center in Fort Devens, Massachusetts is on the grounds of a former military base and is designed for detainees requiring ongoing medical care.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had what appeared to be gunshot wounds to his head, neck, legs and hand when he was captured April 19 after a nearly 24-hour manhunt, according to the criminal complaint accusing him in the marathon blasts. His 26-year-old brother died after a gunfight hours earlier.

Family in Russia

Their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, said Friday that she and her husband had left their home in Dagestan for another part of Russia.

The brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, had said he’d planned to travel to the United States. But that trip has been delayed indefinitely for health reasons.

The mother will not be flying to the United States, where she is wanted on felony charges of shoplifting and destruction of property.

The family lived in Massachusetts before Zubeidat Tsarnaev jumped bail after her arrest on the charges in 2012. The parents moved to Dagestan, a semiautonomous republic in southern Russia that year.

Russian authorities twice raised concerns in 2011 to U.S. authorities about the mother and her older son, sources said.

U.S. authorities added both their names to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, database, which includes half a million names.

Zubeidat Tsarnaev has denied the reality of the bombing. She believes it was fake. She said she has seen a video pushing the wild idea, and that there was no blood, that paint was used instead.

While insisting Russian and U.S. authorities often work together, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he wished U.S. authorities could have done more to prevent the Boston attack.

But he also lashed out against those in the West who have slammed Russia for human rights abuses in its actions toward Chechnya, the Tsarnaevs’ original war-torn homeland.

Report: carjacking ordeal

Three days after that attack, and hours after authorities released images of the two suspects, they spontaneously decided to go to New York’s Times Square to blow up their six remaining explosives, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators.

But a botched carjacking spoiled the impromptu road trip, said Tsarnaev, whose account was outlined by New York’s police commissioner.

Before forcing their way into the vehicle the night of April 18, the brothers shot dead a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, police said.

The hijacked vehicle, a Mercedes SUV, ran low on fuel, and they stopped at a service station, where the vehicle’s owner escaped. Shortly thereafter, police picked up the trail of the SUV and pursued it. Authorities say the men threw bombs out the vehicle’s window at them. The gun battle and Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death followed.

In a Boston Globe story, the man who was carjacked — a 26-year-old entrepreneur identified only as Danny — described his 90-minute ordeal that began when a man brandishing a silver handgun got into his Mercedes.

Danny told the Globe, the gun-wielding man confessed to pulling off the Boston bombing and to killing a police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MIT’s campus is located. They stopped to pick up a second man, presumably the other brother.

Danny’s friend spoke to CNN

Danny relayed his experience to one of his former professors, James Fox, who teaches criminology. Fox spoke with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday.

“One of the alleged bombers got out … knocked on the passenger window. Danny couldn’t hear what he was saying, so he rolled down the window to hear. Tamerlan then reached inside, opened the door, pulled out a gun, got in the passenger seat, and pointed the gun at Danny,” Fox said.

During the harrowing ride, Danny did various things to convince Tamerlan to spare his life. He emphasized he is from China, and that Chinese are very good to Muslims. He also downplayed the cost of his Mercedes SUV.

At first, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev continued to drive the sedan, trailing the SUV. But he eventually climbed into the car with Danny and Tamerlan, Fox said.

“As long as that drive continued, over an hour and a half, there was interaction. There was talk about cell phones, and CD players, and girls. He became a person, and that was critical to his survival,” Fox said.

When they stopped to refuel at a Shell gas station, Danny managed to slip away to a Mobil gas station, where he told an employee there what happened.

“He fell down, screaming, ‘Please, please call … the police. They want to kill me. They have a gun, they have a bomb,'” Tarek Ahmed, the clerk working in the station, told CNN’s Piers Morgan.

“I was waiting (for) someone to shoot me at this moment,” Ahmed said, adding he couldn’t see outside from where he called.

Within five minutes, the gas station was teeming with police, who quickly took up pursuit of the stolen SUV.